WACO, Texas (KXXV) — The Texas Esports finals were decided at Baylor.
The Mark and Paula Hurd Welcome Center was packed with competitors and fans who just want to play games, and Baylor wanted to show how it can harness their passion for their future.
"Reaching kids that normally wouldn't be involved in extracurricular activities in their schools. Kids that are involved in those do much better in school, they do much better in finding careers," co-founder of COPE and Baylor Alumnus, Shae Williams, said.
"With gaming, there's a lot of different pathways for jobs and for scholarships. The goal from this is to actually have these kids learn a lot of technical and soft skills. Learning about respect, empathy, communication, leadership," co-founder of Vanta, Ed Lallier, said.
Organizations like COPE and Vanta collaborated with Baylor to make this event happen. For the leaders of the organizations, seeing events like these always hits close to home.
"Collaborating for Baylor was incredibly important to me because I came to Baylor for a computer science degree because of gaming. But it was actually my son that found competitive Fortnite and when he became a pro Fortnite gamer, it opened up my eyes to a whole new world," Williams said.
"We started Vanta in response to my son, unfortunately being cyberbullied early COVID. So we made Vanta to be that safe place for kids to game with adult supervision," Lallier said.
Every year, more kids are picking up controllers or turning on their computers to join.
"We are really working with the community to try to get Esports to be a varsity sport...my hope is that that elementary schools start taking up, you know, creating after-school program for Esports," Lallier said.
"I want to see lots of events like this pulling in middle school, high school kids from across the state but also it's about hosting bigger events here and just continuing to build this world," Williams said.
Gaming has come a long way; The future of gaming is here and it's only going to get bigger from here.
